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In the spirit of objectivity, it should be stated that small business owners could learn some critical lessons from big business. Below are four key practices that successful large companies do on a consistent basis. For small business owners with a vision to grow their company, following these practices is part of a road map for sustainable success.

1) Build the right team and empower them

Small business owners get great satisfaction from building their companies from the ground up and being involved in all levels of operations. To move to the next level, however, a business owner needs to build a core team – one that is self-directed and we-focused. The crucial element of delegating and empowering is to set clear expectations for how success will be determined. Large companies set specific goals at the departmental level so that leaders can manage to those expected outcomes. This allows the senior leader to use dashboards to track progress and let go of managing the minor details.

2) Work on your business, not just in your business

Easier said than done, I recognize. This was the advice I was given when I became president and chief executive officer of Park Bank. The key is to develop a strategic plan no matter the size of your business. Large companies do this consistently. Small ones do it with less frequency, but it is just as important. The strategic plan forces longer-term thinking and planning. Daily action plans should feed directly into the longer-term plan. The beauty of smaller companies is that they can be much more agile with the strategic plan and adjust more quickly.

3) Document critical business processes

For entrepreneurs this is painful, but essential. Think of the depth of knowledge that resides in your head. If someone else needed to do a particular function, what would he/she need to know? Start by listing out the functions critical to operate the business each day. For example, do you know how to access a software program if the primary user is gone? Do you know where all your signed contracts are? Checklists and flow charts are simple ways to illustrate a process or procedure. Over time, you can transition into more formal written procedures, processes and manuals. This exercise will speed up new employee training and prevent lapses in critical functions when someone leaves, which directly affects customer service and profitability. If you need more convincing, talk to any M&A expert. The existence of written procedures and processes will increase the value of your business. On the flipside, not having this documentation will decrease the financial value of your company in the eyes of a potential buyer or investor if not present.

4) Invest in good financial expertise

Excel spreadsheets only go so far as does using a family member to help manage the books -unless your spouse or brother is an accountant. To scale your company for growth, a good internal and external accountant is critical. An accessible and experienced business banker will also add real value. Having the right financial people on your team is necessary not only for accurate financial records and tax assistance, but to convert raw data into real business insights, helping you to identify trends, prevent missteps and to find opportunities. To find the right partners, word-of-mouth is very effective. Talk with your peers and advisors. They’ll be happy to share their experience and knowledge – and even make an introduction.

5) They stay close to their customer
A small business owner interacts with their customers, understands what their customers want, how they want it delivered and is often directly involved in serving them. Leading by example also reinforces a powerful and consistent culture across the company, so employees are delivering a product and experience consistent with the customer’s desires.

6) They make every dollar count
“Necessity is the mother of invention” as verbalized by Greek philosopher Plato in 400 B.C.E. Dead weight, products that don’t sell or inefficient processes can’t be hidden nor tolerated in a small company. Small business owners know how to maximize their limited resources and search for new ways to operate, sell, hire and market. Some of the most innovative ways to reach new markets and grow have come from internal creative problem-solving and from tapping into a network of advisors, many of which are available at no cost. Think of your banker, peers, universities and business resource groups such as Scale Up and BizStarts.

7) They make decisions with agility
There are plenty of reasons not to take action. There’s risk and change with every new idea – and some degree of analysis is needed. But the reality in corporate America is that decisions and change move slowly for lots of reasons – paralysis by analysis, committee overload, a quest for perfection, daily distractions or fear of failure, to name a few. Not for small business owners. They know to survive is to adapt. They make decisions, assess, adjust and repeat.

It’s that time of year again. For millions of consumers, this is peak spending season; you’ll be buying gifts, making food, and taking time off work to relax with your friends and loved ones.

For marketers, this is crunch time—your chance to end the year with a bang and send your company’s sales firmly into the black. Holiday spending this year is already off to a booming start, with $9.36 billion in sales over Thanksgiving weekend—a 16 percent increase over last year—so how can your company position itself to earn a piece of that pie?

Try implementing these marketing tips for extra visibility during the holidays:

1. Focus on one niche.

You may ordinarily cater to multiple demographics, but for your holiday campaign, it’s better to focus on one niche at a time. This will give you the chance to speak more directly, with more appropriate visuals, narrative devices, and wording in your campaign. This is especially important when you start focusing on empathy, which I address further down in this list.

2. Hammer the emails.

More than 44 percent of consumers check their email on a daily basis to look for deals—and you can bet the holiday season will drive that number (and resulting purchasers) even higher. Emails are a common source of discounts, sales, and other product-related announcements, which means they’re a key opportunity for getting noticed, especially when the market is already saturated with holiday-themed advertisements. Step up your email marketing efforts over the course of the next month to take advantage of this, and make sure you have something valuable to offer (whether that’s a free gift, a discount, or some other promotion).

3. Use a character.

If you’re working on an advertising campaign, or a temporary marketing angle to boost sales, consider introducing a holiday-themed character. It may sound gimmicky at first, but depending on your brand voice, you could play it up as a gimmick—using it as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the egregious surplus of holiday characters already in circulation. McDonald’s is using that tactic this year with its “Juliette” character, a doll that comes to life—even though it’s taking a more serious approach. Characters are relatable, and play into the Christmas/holiday theme of storytelling and childhood nostalgia.

4. Be funny.

During the holidays, family tensions are high, parents are dealing with kids’ high expectations, and budgets are pushed to their limits. Even the most enthusiastic people are experiencing high levels of stress, depression, and anxiety. The last thing people want is an advertisement that makes those feelings worse. Instead, try to lighten things up by injecting humor into your ads and marketing. Make fun of ridiculous traditions, crack a joke that everyone will understand, or just be silly in your approach. People will appreciate the lightness in what is otherwise a high-stress time.

5. Empathize.

Some of the most effective advertisements are ones that capitalize on human emotions, and the holidays are a perfect time to take advantage of that. The emotion you try to capitalize on will depend on your demographic. If you’re targeting parents, play up the thrill of seeing children open present on Christmas morning. If you’re targeting young adults in relationships, focus on finding the perfect gift for a loved one. If you’re targeting children, focus on magical elements, lights, and sounds.

6. Inspire nostalgia.

Celebrating the holidays conjures feelings of nostalgia for everybody—and nostalgia is an especially powerful emotion because of its bittersweet nature. How you inspire nostalgia is up to you—you could use scenery in an advertisement that looks like it came from decades past, tell multi-generational stories that relate to multiple age groups, or even use old music to force people to remember their childhoods. It’s another route to empathy, but it’s a more powerful one that serves all demographics.

You certainly can’t wait 22 years to complete your next project, no matter how unconventional it may seem. While the scope of Darwin’s theory is likely larger than what you’re working on right now, we can all relate at least to some degree with the internal turmoil he experienced in regard to completing a major project.

For some of us, it’s that very anxiety about our work and sharing it that keeps us from seeing it through to the end.

Even if you spend endless hours constructing a narrative about how impactful an idea can be, nothing changes if you don’t deliver on that idea. Shipping—or bringing an idea to fruition—is what causes change to happen.

Our job as professionals, then, is to finish what we begin. Sharing our completed work can be daunting, for sure, but it also happens to be the most compelling catalyst for change.

Let’s look at some of the roadblocks that get in the way and how you can overcome those to complete and deliver the incredible projects you dream up.

Being Ready vs. Being Prepared

Is your market prepared for your project? Are you ready to produce? Is your project good enough? Is it the right time? These are all necessarily honest questions.

Seth Godin—a champion and voice in the art of achieving an end product—wrote on the difference between being ready and being prepared in the 99u’s book series, Make Your Mark: The Creative’s Guide to Building a Business with Impact:

“We tell people that the route to Carnegie Hall is paved with practice, practice, practice. But practice is another word for preparation. I’m not talking about being prepared. Preparation isn’t the same as ready. Ready is an emotional choice, the decision to put something into the world and say, ‘Here, I made this.’ The emotional choice of exposing ourselves and shipping the work. The paradox is obvious: the more important the idea, the less we can be ready. And so we fret that the world, or our market, isn’t ready for the leap. The world isn’t ready for mixed-race couples, or gay marriage, or a woman CEO, we say. The market isn’t ready for a $400 smartphone or e-books or a national brand of vegan ice cream, we say. It’s too soon, we say. Everywhere we turn, the doors appear to be closed, not open. . . . Here’s the thing: Every idea that matters hits the market too soon. While you’re busy practicing and preparing, you’re also hiding from the market, keeping your worthy and world-changing idea from the rest of us. If you wait until you are ready, it is almost certainly too late.“

Once you embrace this difference and know where you stand, you can get to work.

Sometimes the best way to put an idea to the test is not to consider the multitude of variables or outcomes for the sake of perfection, but to put it into the world and adapt alongside of it. Like observing a child, you’ll watch it stumble, learn, grow, fail, and (hopefully) succeed.

The Need for Perfection

Completing and delivering a project invites learning, and when learning is a daily habit, you’re setting yourself up for success.

Look at the patterns of authors, scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs: the great ones ship their ideas, learn everything they can, iterate, and do it again.

It isn’t about removing the fear or uncertainty from the process. It isn’t about reducing every opportunity for failure or disaster. Yes, make something excellent, but expect issues to arise and be ready to deal with them empathetically. Doing so helps you learn what to improve and it gives your project a fighting chance to make a difference.

At Help Scout, we recently shipped Beacon. There was a clear understanding of who it is for, what it is for, and the change we were trying to make. It wasn’t perfect at launch, but it was ready. In just the first week, problems arose and they were fixed; insights were shared and they got us thinking; feedback was given that opened our eyes.

We didn’t ship Beacon, step back, and pop champagne. We’re right next to it, watching it improve the way our customer interact with their customers, and we’re learning something new everyday.

Imagine if we’d waited for perfect. Imagineif we hadn’t shipped. What would we have learned?

What Will They Think of You?

Revealing an idea or product is fraught with risk and invites criticism.

Because we’re hardwired to be social, we worry about what others think or perceive of us. If the idea flops, it’s hard not to take it personally. It’s even worse if lots of money or time was spent with no reward. No wonder it’s easier to generate ideas than it is to finalize an end product.

However, shipping a project should never be a testament toyour character or identity, but rather the change you seek to make. If the change doesn’t happen, it’s the idea that needs tinkering, not your identity.

Fifteenth century German inventor Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press at a time when Europe was about 96% illiterate. It’s quite possible that the printingpress could have failed, everyone thinking Gutenberg was a joke. But as history shows us, this audacious project changed people, communities, and the world.

The greatest obstacle known to finishing what you start is ultimately you—all your fears, anxieties, and doubts. Some of this hesitation is warranted because you want to ensure that all your ducks are in a row, but there comes a breaking point where all of your reviewing and polishing is merely an illusion for hiding. The longer you delay, the longer it’ll take for you to learn something meaningful that helps you and your project move forward.

This brings us back to a fundamental lesson on creating change: if you don’t ship, you’ll never know.

Investing Mistakes to Avoid

Along the way, you may make a few investing mistakes, however there are big mistakes that you absolutely must avoid if you are to be a successful investor. For instance, the biggest investing mistake that you could ever make is to not invest at all, or to put off investing until later. Make your money work for you – even if all you can spare is $20 a week to invest!

While not investing at all or putting off investing until later are big mistakes, investing before you are in the financial position to do so is another big mistake. Get your current financial situation in order first, and then start investing. Get your credit cleaned up, pay off high interest loans and credit cards, and put at least three months of living expenses in savings. Once this is done, you are ready to start letting your money work for you. Read more

Generating Revenue With Good Planning

For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, may websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace.

The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a “food” section, an “accomodation” section and an “entertainment” section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.

When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page. You can also earn from programs like Google’s Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly.

As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away! Read more

While quite a bit of time and research goes into selecting stocks, it is often hard to know when to pull out – especially for first time investors. The good news is that if you have chosen your stocks carefully, you won’t need to pull out for a very long time, such as when you are ready to retire. But there are specific instances when you will need to sell your stocks before you have reached your financial goals.

You may think that the time to sell is when the stock value is about to drop – and you may even be advised by your broker to do this. But this isn’t necessarily the right course of action.

Stocks go up and down all the time, depending on the economy…and of course the economy depends on the stock market as well. This is why it is so hard to determine whether you should sell your stock or not. Stocks go down, but they also tend to go back up.

There are many different ways to market with Facebook. A good Facebook marketer is going to be aware of all of them. The truth is that most beginners do not know exactly how to deal with all the possibilities offered by Facebook. This is why you must always deal with professionals. Out of all the different ways to market with Facebook there are some that stand out. Let us think about the most common methods that are currently used.

Facebook Pages and Groups

Pages and groups are great ways to market with Facebook. There are differences between the two so we need to be aware of them in order to realize the true potential of each technique. Pages are definitely more customizable but groups allow members to invite new members. This is the biggest difference between the two. With a group you can get new members based on your current member base but with pages all that you can expect in a viral in-house Facebook promotion is the use of the Share button. A page is a great way to establish brand notoriety and groups are great to start discussions. Read more

There are many benefits of Facebook marketing that we need to talk about and all moves around the fact that Facebook is currently the most popular social network in the world. Even if it started with just teenagers creating accounts, it now has a huge population base that covers people of all ages and interests. Let us talk about some of the most important benefits of Facebook Marketing. Read more

Email’s relevance and impact for nonprofit organizations continues to grow. According to theM+R Benchmark 2016 report, email lists for nonprofits grew by an average of 14% in 2015, outpacing their average churn rate of 11.4%.

The same benchmark report also found that email action metrics, like open and click through rates are all down.

Subscribers are growing, but they’re engaging with emails less? Huh?

Don’t take your list subscribers for granted. Getting them on your list is just the first step. If you want them to join, volunteer, or otherwise become active members, your emails need to inspire them.

Follow These Five Tips for a More Effective Email Strategy

1) Know your Personas

It always starts with your personas, right? You can’t send compelling, motivating emails if you don’t know what inspires and motivates your personas. Recognize that different personas may be more motivated by different messages, so tailor content that appeals to your personas’ varying interests. If you haven’t created your personas, or it’s time to freshen them up, check out these persona templates developed specifically for nonprofit organizations.

2) Get Email Addresses the Right Way – Don’t Buy Lists

Bad, aged information. Low conversion rates. Is the member application rate return on a cold list ever worth the squeeze? No. Even less so when you consider how you could have used that effort and resources to attract warm prospects into your database.

Attracting people to your organization and into your prospect database is why you publish all that great content. Instead of wasting money and energy on a purchased list, take a hard look at how your content is performing. Are people sharing their email addresses with you to access your best content? If not, then you need to reassess what you’re publishing.

Perhaps your inbound list is light because traffic to your website and blog is light. Your gated content converts well — you’re just not generating enough traffic to see the prospect growth you need. That should trigger a harder look into your SEO and PPC strategies.

You have many inbound marketing options to pull potential volunteers, members, and donors into your database, and all of them are better than buying a list.

3) Segment Your Email List — Not all Constituents are at theSame Level of Commitment

Your prospects and members are touched by different stories and messages. That’s why you want to tailor email content by persona and behavior. They also differ in the level of commitment, financial or otherwise, they’re ready to make right now.

While financial means are part of this equation, also keep in mind length and frequency of donations. Someone who made donation a month ago probably isn’t ready for another fundraising email.

If you’re trying to nudge semi-active members to increase their activity, then customize your emails highlighting past and upcoming events similar to those that have interested them in the past.

Whatever the nature of a specific email campaign, tailor the content based on the subscriber’s expressed interests, taken from both their online and offline activity with your organization.

4) Make a Compelling Offer

The M+R Benchmark report found that nonprofits send their subscribers, on average, 50 emails a year, 19 of which are fundraising appeals.

You can use your non-fundraising emails to encourage other types of engagement, which strengthen the relationship the prospect has with your organization. Ideally, this leads to more engagement down the line.

In the meantime, you want your emails to each have a compelling call-to-action (CTA). You can offer new content that continues to tell the story of the work your organization is doing. You can ask them to share some links to your website through their own social media profiles. Are you looking to increase your volunteer ranks?

Whatever the email’s CTA, make it the sole focus of the email and use action-oriented language on your CTA button.

5) User their Behavior to Trigger Relevant Follow up Emails

Once you have a prospect in your database, you can continue to gather data about their digital behavior. You’ll know which emails they open and click through, and which they don’t. You’ll see which emails they open but which inspire no action.

Use this information to design campaigns targeting your most engaged users. Are some of them ripe to make the jump from content consumer to member? Target them in a membership drive campaign. Are some members consistently attending your events, but don’t share your content? Maybe you can run an ambassador campaign and ask them to share some content you provide in the email? Don’t overlook the unengaged. Test out some re-engagement campaigns.

And don’t forget your thank-you emails! Whether they attended an event, subscribed to a new membership service, or volunteered – any offline or online action should trigger a tailored thank-you email.

As you master these tips, it might be time to test out automating some of your email campaign work. Then you can really scale your email fundraising. But first, work these tips to find out what sort of segmenting, triggers, and messages really move your people.

Samples of Email Layouts you can use:

---------------------Subject line-----------------------
How you can tap into 500 million ready-to-buy customers...
----------------------BODY-----------------------------
Hi there,
Did you know that Facebook has over 500 million users?
That is very interesting, but did you know that you can
actually harness the power of facebook marketing to tap
into these users and make money from them?
==> Insert Link To Your Website or offer
Huge companies like Coca Cola and Nike are already making
millions by marketing their products on Facebook.
Did you know that you can too?
I created a complete product for you where I reveal
hot insider's tips that the gurus use to make HUGE
piles of money using only facebook.
==> Insert link to your website
Discover the secrets to facebook marketing today, and
catapult your income through the roof.
Yours in success
YOUR NAME
---------------------END OF EMAIL--------------------
Ofcourse there are many many more email examples online but this is just a few of them, make sure to pick one that is less Spam-ish
or edit them to be less Spam-ish for better results!

If you plan to pursue IT career, it is very likely that you will have to work with SQL at some point. SQL is short for Structured Query Language and is a programming language used to retrieve, save and delete data from relational databases. If you are making a career in IT, learning SQL is a must. Find out how to learn SQL with our short guide below.

You can learn SQL by taking a training course from one of the software companies producing RDBMS like Oracle or Microsoft Corp. If you pass the exam at the end of the SQL course you will get official SQL certification, which can help you find a better position if you are looking for a job.

Your second choice is to finish a course by independent IT companies offering educational IT courses. Although these SQL courses usually come with a hefty price tag, they might be quite helpful. Some of these companies even offer their own certification programs.

So far we talked about official ways to learn SQL and get certified, but this is not your only option. There are many quality SQL books that can help you get up to speed with the language. If you decide to buy a SQL book and learn by yourself, then do some research online and choose a book that has great reviews.

All the SQL learning options we listed above are paid, however you can learn SQL for free by using one of the many online SQL resources. There are 1’000s of websites offering free online SQL tutorials and some of them even offer discussion forums, where you can get SQL help when you need it.

Different database software makers use different SQL dialects, however the differences are not that significant. MS SQL Server proprietary SQL extension is called T-SQL for example, while Oracle’s is called PL/SQL. Despite the fact that there are many SQL dialects, the important thing is to learn the SQL concepts and you’ll be able to work with any proprietary SQL extension.

Having SQL knowledge will help you in your work and will make you more valuable to your employer. It really doesn’t matter if you had a formal SQL training or you learnt it on your own. And remember when all is said and done, what counts is your SQL knowledge and experience no matter how exactly did you acquire them.

IT professionals can learn SQL by visiting http://www.sqltraining.org and reading the SQL articles published there.